Philip Kerr - False Nine

‘Paying back. I get that.’

‘No, it’s not about paying back. It’s about paying forward, I suppose. I think the game needs a bit of that right now. Don’t you? If it’s going to continue to be the game we know and love? I was lecturing the poor kid in the car about the importance of recognising the game’s past, but the future’s even more important. This is going to sound bogus coming from someone as well-off as me, but when we think about the people who are investing in the game — the Qataris, the Emirates, the Glazers, the John Henrys, the Ortegas, the Pinaults, the Abramoviches — it just seems to be about money and nothing else. That’s all people seem to understand by the word “investment”. But there has to be a different kind of investment — an investment in the future. We have to do something for how we want football to be, not for how it is. As soon as I saw this boy I realised that my greatest fear was that somehow he’d slip through the net, and remain undiscovered. Which would have been a tremendous loss to the game. After all, you don’t have to be a Manchester United fan to appreciate George Best; or a cul to appreciate the skill of Lionel Messi. Who knows? Maybe one day John Ben Zakkai will do something similar for a promising boy he talent spots. I’d like to think so.’

Santiago nodded.

‘There’s all of that,’ I said, ‘and then there’s this: lately I’ve been behaving like a shit. You know? With women? Well, you might excuse it and say that I’m a man and sometimes I behave like any other man. But I can’t seem to stop myself from doing it or even to admit it — at least, not without hurting someone. So. You might say that bringing John Ben Zakkai here, to you guys — that this is my penance. This is how I get to look at my face in the mirror again. This is how I manage to live with myself. Does that make any sense at all?’

‘Scott. I’m a Roman Catholic. I’m named after St James the Great. The first disciple and the patron saint of Spain. What you say makes perfect sense to me.’

‘Of course, now that I’ve been here I know that I was right to come to Madrid after all. This place is amazing.’

We shook hands because in football — especially in Spain — I’m happy to say it’s still important.

London was cold and grey and wet which was fine by me. I’d had enough of living out of suitcases for a while. I just wanted to draw the curtains, switch on the telly and stay home for a week. Chelsea were top of the Premier League — José was on his most brilliantly provocative form ever — Arsenal were third and London City were in the drop zone. In spite of City’s desperate travails it felt good to be back home, even if that meant a trip to an FA independent regulatory commission hearing into my alleged misconduct.

The FA headquarters used to be at Soho Square and before that in Lancaster Gate but, since August 2009, it’s been at Wembley. It cost the FA £5 million to leave the eight-floor building at Lancaster Gate, a not insignificant sum given the £10 million it had already cost to relocate, and at a time when the FA was struggling to find a sponsor. But then the FA has always been very good at wasting money and ripping off football fans. Why else are the FA Cup semi-finals now played at Wembley? To make money for the FA, of course, and to hell with the cost and inconvenience for the fans. But they can’t even find a sponsor for the FA Cup since the Budweiser deal ended. For all the good these bastards do, the home of English football might as well still be the Freemasons Arms in Covent Garden. Very little seems to have changed since 1863 in the way these goons think. About the only way they’re better than FIFA is that they’re probably too dumb to be corrupt.

Wembley. Whenever I think of it now I think of Matt Drennan, who hanged himself on Wembley Way because he couldn’t bear to be out of the game. That and a whole lot of other things — booze, pills, depression, divorce. The trouble is that when we play football professionally we’re too young to know how lucky we are. Unfortunately by the time we know how lucky we are, it’s too late and we’re on the cusp of retirement. Football is the cruellest sport. I watched a telly programme about bees, and the way drones are kicked out of the hives at the end of the season reminded me of the way we treat footballers who are similarly considered to be past it. The drones fly off and try to figure out what to do with themselves but in the end the result is always the same; they die. Football is almost as bad as that.

I drove to Wembley in my Range Rover. You know what the outside of the place looks like: it’s a big, modern, overpriced stadium with a carrying handle like a shopping basket at your local Tesco. You’ve seen it often enough when England are scraping a 2–2 draw with Switzerland or 1–1 with the fucking Ukraine. Thank God for Frank Lampard. Not so much three lions that night as three pussies.

That’s not a joke I’d make on Twitter. I was glad I’d closed my Twitter account. I wish I’d done it sooner.

I nudged my way through the waiting newsmen and into the car park. It was a Friday and there wasn’t much to write about, obviously. A few die-hard feminists had rolled out the red carpet for me. Literally. On the carpet was written: This is what a real period looks like. And there were banners which I slowed down to read. It seemed the least I could do. MENstruation: as usual the problem begins with a Man. And You’d think a big c**t would understand about periods. I kind of liked that banner. I even winked at the cute girl holding it in front of my windscreen.

Wembley. Inside the offices of the Football Association, things are a mess — some wanker architect’s idea of what the future looks like, with the kind of brightly coloured, essentially uncomfortable furniture you might have expected to find in a Stanley Kubrick film of the early 1970s. Whenever I’m there I half expect to see Malcolm McDowell strolling around with a blackthorn stick in one hand and a bowler hat on his head. And without doubt I was expecting a solid kick in the balls. Not to mention a hefty fine.

Wembley. As if the place wasn’t already hopelessly opaque, all of the windows have ‘privacy panels’ made of frosted vinyl, presumably to stop disgruntled England fans with sniper rifles getting a bead on any of the cunts who work there; meanwhile the carpets in the so-called ‘breakout areas’ — I think I know what that is on a football pitch, I’m not so sure what one looks like in a suite of offices — are grey, red and green like some hideous piece of abstract art that’s been entered for the Turner Prize. And why not? A fucking carpet is no worse than any of the crap that wins the prize, year on year. Everything about the interior of the FA at Wembley jars like a bad LSD trip and seems to confirm exactly why England football is in such a parlous state; as you walk from one eyesore office to another, you tell yourself that if they can’t get something as simple as the interior decor right, how can they possibly expect to be any better with the management of English football?

Wembley. The wall in the tiny room where my barrister and I were asked to wait until the actual hearing began had a full-length picture of the England Ladies’ football number 10, Jodie Taylor. A nice-enough-looking girl if you like women in football kit but it was as if someone was trying to remind me that women play football too, and that a tasteless Twitter joke about a man who couldn’t stay on the pitch and finish the game because it was his period was not going to be tolerated. I pointed this out to Miss Shields, my brief.

‘I’m sorry some women were offended by my joke,’ I said. ‘In defence I should say that my social media offence was committed in Barcelona, where people have a sense of humour, and not in England, where apparently they don’t. But at least now I know why having a period is sometimes called the curse.’